Such automatic punching machines have been known for a long time. For example, German Patent No. 279 610 discloses a punching machine which has an associated gripping/lifting device which conveys the punched material to an appropriate deposit. These known punching machines, however, are designed to deal with the punching of substantially horizontally-lying material, in which respect each sheet is individually gripped and lifted, punched and then further conveyed.
In the case of horizontal punching, each punching stroke brings about the punching of a fairly large stack of material all at once. The material to be punched is received in an approximately horizontally-lying delivery channel and is conveyed by the moving-up of material for punching as far as a gripping/lifting device which lifts off the punched stacks and places them onto a transfer station for futher conveyance to an automatic bundling machine. The material to be punched stands approximately perpendicularly in the delivery channel, but the angle of inclination of the individual punched sheets changes constantly as a result of friction in the channel, inherent curvature, expansion upon some stcaks being gripped and lifted away, different shapes of the punched sheets and so forth, so that the gripping device often is not properly inserted between two sheets, but encounters a sheet and damages it, which in turn entails disturbances in the production cycle. After they are fitted away, the stacks are to be bundled, i.e. surrounded with and held together by a band. This band is advantageously placed transversely to the surfaces of cut, but for this the stack has to be turned.
Often the punched material has non-uniform outer contours. For further conveyance the stacks are deposited at a transfer station which is provided with retaining rods which fit exactly into contour recesses. These retaining rods are intended to prevent, the individual sheets from shifting mutually or the entire stack from tilting over during subsequent conveyance.
However, these retaining rods often have to be placed at just those locations at which the gripping/lifting device needs a free space to enable it to deposit the stacks. In the past, therefore, irregularly shaped stacks have been inserted by hand into the transfer station or the automatic bundling machine. This is timeconsuming, monotonous and expensive.